


water; fire

by fraternite



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Drowning, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, not quite canon divergence but canon bending for sure, pre-stream, spoilers for Caleb's backstory (s02e19) for sure, very bad but historically accurate concepts and treatment of mental illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-06-24 05:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 12,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15623112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: Even a broken person can be someone else's healing.(An alternate origin story for Caleb and Nott.)





	1. Chapter 1

Somebody is crying in the corner.  He looks to see what kind of person it is, but before his eyes reach them, his mind has drifted away and he doesn’t remember what he’s looking for.

He’s looking at a small room.  There is a pot in one corner. There is a person in another corner.  There is a door in another corner. There is Caleb in another corner.

What is that awful sound, and why won’t it stop?

 

Some time later, he finds his eyes settled on his hands, which are limp in his lap: threadbare hands against threadbare trousers.  Can he move them? Two fingers on one of the hands twitch, but he doesn’t know if it’s his doing. He watches for hours, his mind blank.

He wakes up with a start, his neck stiff and aching, his hands trembling with fear his mind doesn’t remember.  The room is quiet with the silence that comes after a thunderclap, after the scream of the lightning. Then the person on the other side of the room starts their endless, pitiful whimpering again.

 

Someone strong drags him to his feet.  Caleb watches his feet shuffle down a hallway.  There is cold water. He can’t breathe and he can’t see and he

 

The door squeals open, and a metal tin lands on the floor in front of him.  Some of the porridge has spilled out onto his foot. It’s lukewarm. He’s supposed to eat.  Later, the tin is gone and he can’t remember whether he ate the food. There is still a spill of porridge across the floor, crusty and sour-smelling.

He barely notices when the other corner goes silent.

 

Later on, there are people, and dragging a bundle across the stone floor, and then nothing.  The nothing gets bigger and heavier and Caleb’s throat is closing up, his ears ringing with the quiet, and then the door squeals again and there is, instead of quiet weeping, a woman’s voice, talking.  He slowly melts back against the wall and watches a string of ants track across the floor with bits of dried-up porridge.

The weeping stayed in one corner but the chatter is quick, filling the room, bouncing from one corner to another.  It makes Caleb’s head ache, the way the words come too quickly for him to follow, so that as soon as he has grasped one ( _ shoes.)  _ the voice is a hundred miles ahead and he is drowing in isolated words that make no kind of sense. (-- _ unless--village--won’t. _ ) 

And then--out of nowhere:

Caleb feels a hand on his face.  He follows with his eyes: from the hand to the wrist, along the arm, to an older woman with gray in her hair, speaking in rapid common the last few words of a spell.  As his eyes meet hers, she smiles and laughter lines run across her face like ripples in a pond.

He looks past her to the walls of the small room (cell) around him, a room that is his home in this hospital (asylum), that has been his home for the past eleven years, ever since the night of his graduation, ever since the night when he killed his parents, when he dragged the cart in front of the door (the harness empty and jingling softly, the feel of the age-polished wooden shafts so sickeningly familiar under his hands, except that--he notices with equal parts pride and shame--his calluses are gone) and he stretched out his hand and called out the fire and he heard them  _ scream _ (the smell of singed meat) and suddenly he knew they were dying, he was putting an end to them, to his mother singing nonsense songs to herself as she worked in the kitchen and his father’s kind ways and gentle hands with the animals and everything was wrong and yet  _ he kept doing it _ .

Caleb’s gutteral screams echo off the walls of his cell.  He screams until his throat is raw and his vision goes dark at the edges.  His new cellmate flees to the corner of the room, gibbering frghtened nonsense to herself, and still Caleb is screaming.  He doubles over, gasping for breath, retching over his feet, and still he can’t stop screaming and he can’t stop seeing it.  He tears at his hair and his clothes and his own flesh but he can’t. make it. stop. He can’t make his mind go away like it did before (eleven years ago, oh gods below,  _ eleven years _ ); he is awake and he is here and he knows the truth and  _ it is killing him. _

It is a mercy when the keepers of this place rush in and kick him in the stomach and in the head until everything goes dark.


	2. Chapter 2

Nott hears the footsteps approaching along the hallway and curses her goblin hearing.  If she were something else, something with deadened senses (a human, maybe) she wouldn’t be able to hear the keepers from so far away.  She wouldn’t know they were coming for her, and she’d have a few more minutes of relative peace.

As it is, the slap of boot-soles against the stone fills her head, shakes her body through the rock of the floor.  She knows she has five, maybe ten minutes, and still her skin is sweating and her legs are trembling. She looks around (for the hundredth time, and even though she knows it’s useless, she can’t stop herself) for somewhere to hide, but the room is bare, save for a piss-pot in one filthy corner and a two thin straw-stuffed pallets where the big fellow is stretched out.  The pallets aren’t big enough to hide under, even if she dared go near the goliath who shares (haha, shares, he owns the place and she skitters in orbit around him, her survival dependent on her quick feet and the hot lowland weather that keeps him in a sleepy stupor half the time) the small room with her.

Now she hears the coughing and spluttering of the person they’re bringing back, the scrabble of clawed feet being dragged over the stone and she knows that they’re very close now.  Nott digs her own clawed toes into the cracks between the stones and wedges her body harder into her corner. A jutting rock grinds against her shoulderblade, sending sparks of pain up and down her spine, and her toes are cramping up, she’s pushing so hard, and she knows that it’s all useless.

A rattle of keys, and the door opens, and two men in dirty white robes poke their heads in, check that the goliath is asleep (there’s a reason they always come for her during the hottest part of the day), and then stride in toward Nott.  Her heart is pounding in her ears and her sweat-slick hands slip on the stone walls and she can’t help the little whimper of fear that escapes her.

At the last second before the man’s outstretched hand grasps her neck, she makes her move, darting between his legs and skittering toward the door.  But her stupid terrified legs are jelly and she tumbles, twisting her ankle. She’s back on her feet in a second, and scrabbling on two arms and one good leg across the floor, but it’s too late and the other keeper has snatched her up by the middle and they know her by now, so the rope is quickly looped around her arms, binding them to her body, and he’s so tall that her wild kicking as he carries her down the hallway does absolutely nothing.

Nott wants to scream, but when she does that they just stuff a rag in her mouth, and then she can’t breathe, and that makes what follows even worse.  So she bites her tongue and breathes short, panicked pants and tries to tell herself  _ It’s okay, it’s happened before, you’ll survive.  You always do. _  The knowledge doesn’t do anything to quiet the base, animal fear that surges through her veins.

The keepers’ boots splash in the thin film of water that always covers the floor in the hydrotherapy room.  The water in the tub is still choppy, stirred up by the struggles of the last patient. Throwing logic aside, Nott shrieks and kicks and bucks her body; today her carrier was unprepared but still all her struggles earn her nothing but a bloody nose when he drops her on the floor.  She’s screaming as they hoist her above the water, but it does no good, she’s putting everything she has into fighting them and still they can lift her up anything and plunge her into the tub and Nott’s last desperate shriek is cut off.

Water everywhere.

In her mouth, in her ears, in her eyes.  Her clothes are lead, dragging her down. She can’t swim.  

It’s dark, cold, heavy, inescapable.  There is no up, no down. 

No way out.  Water in her mouth.  Can’t breathe. 

Can’t breathe.

A hand grabs the back of Nott’s tunic and her head breaks the surface she’s choking and crying and shivering and she hates herself for the way she clings to their arms as if they’re her saviors (she loves them for bringing her up out of that awful cold darkness, she hates them for making her so small, she would do anything for them if they would just promise never to do it again).  Huddled in a small, sad heap on the floor, she retches and spits up water; every breath is life and every breath is fire in her ravaged lungs.

As they carry her back to the room where she’ll spend her next twenty-three hours avoiding the big goliath, Nott hangs limp between the two keepers.  In the beginning, maybe she tried to appear tough, but now she knows it doesn’t matter what she does, so she doesn’t try to stop the hot tears that run down her cheeks.  She cries from rage and disgust at her utter powerlessness, at the sad fact that with all her goblin cleverness and her claws and her teeth and her fury, she can do nothing to save herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hydrotherapy, i.e. half-drowning patients in ice baths, really was used for treating mental illnesses in the past. (Back in the days when "mental illness" could mean anything from schizophrenia to developmental disability to being a woman who didn't want to lick her husband's boots.) It's just important to me that you know that I didn't just make that up for the sake of torturing fictional characters.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for suicidal thoughts in this chapter. (If that's something unhealthy for you to read, this chapter can easily be skipped without missing any plot stuff. Take care of yourself.)

It takes two weeks before Caleb can hold himself together enough for the keepers’ attention to slide away from him--enough for him to appear a living soul.  Two weeks: Locked in a dark room to scream himself hoarse three times, beaten to unconsciousness four times, arms tied behind him to keep him from breaking his own hands for six days, ever since the second time.  

Finally, he lies quiet on the floor where they put him, and he does not scream, and he does not try to crush his fingers in the door, and the keepers are gone.  Maybe they think Caleb’s mind has grown well--perhaps a healer somewhere is boasting to his friends about the efficacy of his program of cold-water baths. Maybe they’re just glad of the quiet.

Dripping wet and shivering from the morning’s bath, Caleb lies on the floor and breathes shallowly against the pain in his ribs.  He is quiet, unmoving, but his mind is not well at all. The screaming is still there, just behind his closed eyes, but Caleb is too exhausted--for the moment--to let it out.

He had thought the agony of the memory of that fire-filled night would be his world forever, but even that has changed.  It’s still just as awful as ever, but now there are the memories of the years before that. Caleb remembers being so young, and so proud of himself.  He had a gift, he was told over and over; he had incredible power, such as is given to one in a thousand. The knowledge had kept him awake at night, burning in his chest, keeping his eyes wide and staring into the darkness above his cot.

The future had seemed so full of golden possibility then.  He was going to be great; he was going to serve the Empire; he was going to protect the people.  His gift would be the salvation of thousands, would make the world a safer and more just place. He would live a worthy life--a good life.

What lies it all was. 

Only now does Caleb realize how foolish he was to think that someone like himself could help or protect anyone.  The powers tangled in his brain are a curse and the Empire is a twisted slave-master, and they will bring nothing but horror on the world.  Caleb’s heart is a rotten thing, gray and seeping with decay inside him, and the only thing more disgusting than his inner self is the idea that he once believed himself good.

The clatter of a pan on the stone floor brings Caleb back to himself, and he raises his head to look.  Even that slight movement sends waves of pain shooting up his torso from his cracked ribs, and he breathes through clenched teeth until the blackness receeds from the edges of his vision.  

It is the same food as always: Watery gruel and a chunk of coarse bread.  Despite himself, Caleb’s stomach growls at the thought of food. He probably can’t manage the bread (ever since the second beating, it hurts to move his jaw), especially not with his hands tied behind him, but he could lap at the gruel.  He’d have to cross the floor in sections; crawling, in his previous experience, does not go very well.

But why should he?  Caleb is a broken, sick thing.  He burned his mother and father to death; foul, destructive powers seethe in his fingers; his mind swims in and out of madness.  If he were given the care of such a thing, Caleb would probably put an end to it out of mercy--for the wretched creature as well as for the world that has to endure it.

The keepers here, for whatever reason, don’t see the same way.  When one of their charges will not eat, they force it to take food; Caleb has hazy memories of flailing limbs on the other side of his cell, and choking gulps.  If Caleb refuses the gruel, eventually they will notice, and then there will be something new to endure as they hold him down and pour it into him. Perhaps they are right; perhaps it is a better punishment to keep him alive.

But he doesn’t have to help them with it.

Ignoring the tray, he lowers his head to the ground and lets his eyelids flutter closed.  His cheek throbs with pain against the cold, wet stone of the floor; his broken fingers pulse, swollen against the ropes binding his hands.  He takes slow, careful breaths and tries to let his mind float away into static.

It is like waiting, this lying here in stillness.  But Caleb has nothing to wait for.


	4. Chapter 4

****

When they throw Nott, wet and shivering, onto the floor of a new room, the first thing she does is scrabble backwards into the nearest corner, where she can evaluate the new threats.  With solid stone at her back, she feels a little better (a little less like a sad, half-drowned kitten, a little more like . . . not a goblin fighter, never as brave as that, but maybe a sneaky little goblin wretch) and she can catch her breath and look around.

This room is smaller, which isn’t good; it’ll be hard to keep away from whoever else is in here.  There isn’t a window, either, not that it let in much air in the last room. And whereas the last room had a pair of thin mattresses and (before the goliath smashed them) a small table with a jug of water and a pot in one corner to piss in, this room is completely, utterly bare except for the huddle of a body against the opposite wall.

Nott’s eyes go wide as she realizes: This is a high-security room.  Somebody thought she was dangerous, or at least troublesome, enough to merit a more secure room.  (She’ll take troublesome; she’ll even take annoying. The knowledge that  _ anything _ she did was enough to even make the big people notice her fills her chest with a warmth that pushes away a little of the panic from her last “therapy session.”)

Emboldened by the idea that she’s a dangerous lunatic, someone to be feared, Nott wipes the last of the tears from her eyes and studies the other occupant of her cell.  From here, there’s not much to see. The person is bigger than her, but then almost everyone here is. They aren’t as big as the goliath, which is good, as long as they don’t make up for their small size in speed and meanness.  They also must have done something to merit getting thrown into the more secure room; the realization sends a shiver down Nott’s spine and she has to go over every inch of the room again with her eyes, looking for the best spots to hide, the slight unevennesses of the floor that she can use to her advantage when she runs.

But for now, the other person isn’t doing anything threatening.  They aren’t doing anything at all, in fact, which draws Nott closer.  Stepping on the balls of her feet so her claws don’t scratch against the stone floor, she creeps about halfway across the room and waits.  Still nothing. She halves the distance again, and after a few minutes, finally takes the last few steps to crouch by the person’s side.

It’s a human man, and he appears to be asleep or unconscious.  He’s not in good shape: He’s covered in bruises and dried blood, and deep shadows rim his eyes.  He’s skinny enough that Nott can see the shape of his skull under his pale skin, and his hair and clothes are stiff with dirt.  He is breathing, but it’s shallow and stuttery. She has nothing to fear from him.

Or is he just faking?  Maybe he’s feigning unconsciousness to put her off her guard, waiting until she takes her eyes off him and gets comfy to strike.  She stands over the human for a long time, weighing the danger of antagonizing him against her need to be sure whether she needs to fear him.  In the end, she settles on knowing, even if the answer is Yes.

Nott reaches out a skinny, clawed finger, and pokes the man’s arm--gently at first, then hard enough to shift his starved form.  When he makes no response, she pinches the exposed flesh of his neck.

“Hey,” she says in a rough half-whisper.  “Hey, you.”

With one finger-claw, she cuts a little scratch across his cheek, in one of the few places not already scraped up.  A few beads of blood spring up, dark red against the palor of the man’s skin. He makes a little noise like a moan, deep in his throat, and his hands twitch a little behind his back.  

It’s then that Nott notices that he’s tied up.   _ And _ they’ve broken his hands, if the angry red swelling means what she thinks it does.  He must be a really bad one.

Now that she’s started the process, she needs to know for sure--if he gets untied later, that could change things.  With another careful glance at his face, Nott scrambles over the man and bends down to gnaw at the bindings. They come off with a snap; the skin underneath is striated with strips of white and purple from the tight ropes.  

As the ropes fall away, Nott nudges the man with her toes, this time, hard enough to push him over onto his stomach.  This time, he flinches, whimpering, at the movement, and one broken hand flails blindly about.

But he doesn’t open his eyes, and he doesnt attack her.

Satisfied that her new roommate isn’t going to try to kill her (at least not right now), Nott trots back to the corner farthest from the door.  Kicking away some old, dried-up turds, she curls up with her back to the wall, and lets herself--for the first time in months--fall into a deep sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

Caleb dreams of fire.

At first, it’s the same dream it always is: The cottage, the fire, the screams.  Caleb watches as plumes of fire burst from his hands, the skin blistering and charring, the heat of the flames licking at his face.  The house goes up like dry grass in summer, and he hears his parents’ voices, their last desperate cries replayed in his ears again and again as if it was just yesterday that he killed them.  Tears are running down his face and still he adds to the flames, until the house where he grew up is a mountain of fire towering above him.

Then as if his feet are suddenly unnailed from the ground, he is running into the fire, screaming out his guilt and pain (not apologies, he is too far gone for those; he doesn’t deserve the chance to apologize).  The door crumbles to ash at his touch and he stumbles through the flames and starts to search for the bodies of his parents, but there’s too much smoke and the fire is covering everything and  _ still  _ it is pouring from his hands, from his skin, from his very heart, turning everything he touches into destruction.  

He’s dreamed this before, and it’s always at this point that he comes to, lying on the cold stone floor of the asylum, soaked with sweat and hoarse from screaming, sick to his stomach, trembling.

But this time, he doesn’t wake up, and the dream shifts.  He wanders through the endless inferno, unable to find his parents or his soul or the way out; the fire goes on and on for what seems like hours.  Eventually he finds himself frozen in one spot, and from there he watches as the flames slowly flicker down around him and die, leaving the timbers charred black, the ash knee-deep.  The wind plays with the ash that once was Caleb’s home, his childhood bed, his parents; it tosses a bit of ash up, swirls it around, lets it fall. A fox creeps in and noses through the rubble, then trots away, a charred bone clutched in its teeth.  

The sky grows dark and a heavy, cold rain starts to fall, creating tiny, ash-choked rivulets that run away from Caleb’s feet.  The last remaining ceiling beam, charred and water-logged, creaks and finally falls. Caleb’s feet sink into the slurry of ash and mud that fills the space where the house once stood, and he struggles to keep his balance.  Overhead, lightning streaks across the sky, followed by a crash of thunder.

In the lightning-striped darkness, reality wavers before Caleb’s eyes.  He sees the muck ripple, and then it begins to rise up in thick columns, shapes larger than a person and unnatural in their movement.  One moment they are several yards away, then they are right upon Caleb, looming over him. In the next flash of lightning Caleb sees pits of blackness in the shapes like empty eyes.  He doesn’t know where the knowledge came from, but suddenly he knows: They’ve come to take him. 

He tries to run but the mud drags at his feet.  He has to fight for every inch and it’s not enough, they are right upon him.  He pleads with the shapes, but the wind whips the words away from his lips, and they are mindless faceless creatures of darkness and they have every right to take him.  He has earned his place with them down in the center of the earth.

He doesn’t realize he’s working magic until the bolts of ice-white light leave his hands, striking the monstrous shapes faster than thought.  He doesn’t realize he’s awake until he sees the keepers scrambling back, one of them clutching a shoulder, the other one scooting along the stone floor on his bottom.

Caleb’s ears are full of ringing and his hands are numb.  He watches, bleary-eyed as the keepers make a quick exit, slamming and locking the door behind them.  The floor is pitching and his mouth tastes of copper and he can’t believe he just worked magic, he thought he had locked that part of him away eleven years ago.  His legs tremble; his vision tunnels.

The last thing he sees before the darkness overtakes him is a pair of wide yellow eyes, staring at him with something like hunger.


	6. Chapter 6

_ Magic is amazing, _ Nott thinks as she watches the skinny man sway above her, eyes unfocused.  Her cellmate is as thin as bone, barely strong enough to keep his feet. And yet he scared off three keepers, one of them the big half-orc who used to wrestle the goliath into submission when he went wild.  Just by waving his hands. It’s truly incredible, the power this half-dead husk of a person still holds inside him.

When the man finally staggers, then topples to the floor, Nott scurries over and inspects his hands, looking for trickery.  She sniffs for traces of flash-bang powder or other chemicals, something that could have produced that light and force naturally.  But the man’s hands just smell like the rest of him--like layers of grime and sweat and all the other substances you collect in a place like this.  And they’re not even warm.

As she sits back on her heels, pondering this power, there’s a rattling at the door, and Nott goes scurrying for her corner, ready to repeat her daily losing battle against the keepers, steeling herself for the cold, airless darkness of the hydrotherapy tub.  But the keeper just opens the door the narrowest crack, slides a metal tin across the floor (the door’s not even open wide enough to let the tin through, and half the food spills on the floor when he tilts the pan to get it through the gap), and quickly closes the door and locks it.  He’s still scared of the human and his freakishly strong magic, Nott realizes.

There’ll be no drowning today.  

The man wasn’t trying to stop them from taking her; he’d been sleeping up to the moment the keepers walked in, and he probably didn’t even know what he was doing, he’d looked that wild-eyed and unhinged.  But all the same, his magic has scared off the keepers and granted Nott a reprieve from the icy water, at least for today. Maybe--who knows?--for even longer. 

Nott can’t stop the little giggling chortle that rises in her throat.  She’s safe, for the moment. Her filthy, half-starved cellmate turned out to be a powerful wizard; as long as she’s kept with him, she can hide in his shadow until she can get herself back together and make a plan to get out of here and away from her clan’s territory.

But she can only do that along as he stays up and fighting.  And from the way it looks right now, that won’t be much longer.  He’s sprawled limp on the ground in front of the door, his skin paler than ever, a trickle of blood running along his bitten lip.  His skin is paper-thin and mottled with bruises; even the smallest scratches on his arms and face are slow in knitting back together.  If things go on as they are, his magic will go out (along with his heart) within the month.

So it’s simple, then: She has to keep him alive.

It’s easier than you’d think to move him; for all his height, he’s  _ very  _ skinny, and he makes no resistance as Nott manhandles him onto his back.  She takes stock first, listening at his chest for a heartbeat and pulling up his shirt to count the bruises and gashes on his torso, noting a few that look infected.  She feels his skin for a fever, but she’s not used to human temperatures, and she doesn’t know if the heat beneath her hand is normal for a human or bad. The man shifts a little when she presses her hand against his forehead and mutters something that isn’t Common, his voice tight in the back of his throat.

Food, first, Nott decides.  Fortunately, that much is easy: The metal tray that was just dropped off a few minutes ago.  On it is a cup of water, a crust of hard bread, and a heap of congealed brownish gravy that might contain a few shreds of actual meat.  

She starts with the water, tipping a few drops of it into the man’s mouth.  He chokes and splutters, but then swallows convulsively, and when she holds the cup up to his lips again he takes a few gulping sips on his own.  She moves on to the gravy, scooping it up with her fingers and dripping it, bit by bit, into the man’s mouth.

Halfway through the process, he wakes up most of the way, blinking his eyes open and looking blearily around the room.  Nott tenses, ready to run, but when he finally focuses on her he just shakes his head as if trying to chase away a hallucination.

“ _ Wer . . . wer bist du? _ ” the man rasps out.

She tips another splash of water into his mouth and he coughs, wincing.  With trembling arms, he pushes himself up onto one elbow.

“Who . . . ?” he tries again.  His eyes are watery and too bright, and his voice is a whisper.

“I’m Nott,” she tells him.

“Nott,” he repeats.  With his accent and the waver in his voice, the name is softer, the edges blurred.  She’s never heard her name that way before.

“Eat this.”  She shoves a scrap of bread crust dipped in gravy at him, and he accepts it.  He chews slowly, as if he doesn’t remember how. Partway through he stops chewing and his eyes glaze over, staring through Nott like she isn’t there.  She flicks him gently on the cheek and he snaps back to reality. 

“Finish eating,” she reminds him.  “You’re not allowed to choke, you’re my new guard dog.”  The words seem to go right through him, but he starts chewing again and eventually swallows the bite of bread.

When she tries to give him another bite, he shakes his head.  “Tired,” he whispers, laying his head back down on the floor.

“Fine, but you have to drink the rest of this water up before you sleep,” Nott commands.  She shoves the cup in his face.

His eyes are already closing.  “Can’t.”

Nott is having none of it.  “You can send magic out your fingers,” she argues.  “Don’t tell me you can’t handle a little bit of a drink.”

At her insistence, the man swallows most of the remaining water.  Nott only stops when the man gulps hard a few times like he’s about to be sick.  Not wanting her hard work to go to waste, Nott pulls away the cup.

“Okay, you can sleep now,” she tells him.  “But get ready for more when you wake back up.  We’re going to make you so strong!”


	7. Chapter 7

Caleb sleeps, but it isn’t sleep.  He stumbles through darkness, pursued by shapes made of fire and teeth.  He falls from great heights and he freezes in ice and through all it he hurts, oh he hurts; the pain comes rolling in waves from deep inside, choking him and leaving him trembling in its wake.  

Voices cascade down on him, hammering him down into the mud: His parents, Trent, his classmates, the asylum keepers--and a voice he doesn’t know, rough and piercing, chattering away incomprehensibly in his ears.  He runs and pleads and prays for just a moment of peace, a moment of clean, quiet, darkness, but the fire and the voices and the pain go on unending.

Caleb wakes, but he isn’t awake.  Everything is blurry and shifting, and when he moves his head too fast it all goes black for a minute.  He sees birds with long, red teeth and big yellow eyes that watch him from the ceiling of the room, and great, slick oozes of black fluid that terrify him with their slow advance across the floor.  There is one very small, very tired part of his brain that labels them: Hallucination; the same part wonders with exhausted fear, what happened to him to throw him into such strong fever-dreams that they infect his waking mind as well?

Through the floating shapes before his eyes he sees a small, green creature flitting around with frenetic speed.  It pours water down his throat and puts food in his mouth, and when chills rack his body it runs sharp-clawed fingers through his hair and chants to him in a harsh, tuneless sing-song.  This is certainly a halucination as well, because Caleb knows what he is. No creature, no matter how monstrous, should be touching him, except to punish.

There is pain in his waking world, too, and sometimes he hears a voice that sounds like his own moaning, asking brokenly for mercy that he doesn’t deserve.  He shakes with cold and still he is burning, being eaten up from the inside out. The fire swells in his bones and even though he knows it is no more than what he’s earned, he can’t help but cringe away from it, trying to writhe his way out of his own body.

“Breathe,” a voice he cannot see reminds him.  “It’ll pass.”

There is a hand--small, rough-skinned--in his own and he clutches at it like a lifeline and tries to remember how to breathe.  There is a wet rag on his forehead and Caleb, far beyond trying to figure out what’s real and what’s delusion, lets himself fall into that cool darkness where, for a moment, the pain is muted.

Caleb sleeps, and for a short, blessed time, there is nothing.


	8. Chapter 8

If Nott had known just how wrecked her new guard dog was, she would have abandoned him as a lost cause.  Now that she’s in the middle of trying to save his life, however, she finds she can’t walk away. (After all, she has nothing better to do.)

Her wizard burns with fever for three days after she takes him into her care, tossing and turning with dreams that make him cry out but never really wake.  She pours water into him and puts wet rags on his forehead and neck. When he talks in his own strange language, she answers him in Goblin like you would a little child, telling him to shut up and stop squeaking.  (It’s a reassurance Goblin adults have used through the ages to let their children know that there are others stronger than them who will carry the weight of fear for now.)

She does what she can to fix him up.  She goes over his body carefully, looking for bruises and bumps, licking his cuts to start them healing like her clan used to do for each other after a fight.  She strips more of the rags from her body to tie up the bigger gashes. His hand is a mess; it looks like the fingers have been broken in several places, and she finds herself puffing up with hot anger at whoever dared to hurt her guard dog in this way.

After three days, the fever finally breaks.  Nott wakes up from a nap curled up against the man’s back to find the fire radiating from his body gone, and with it the man’s restless tossing and turning.  That’s probably a good thing--only he looks more dead than ever now, lying still, the flush of fever gone from his palild cheeks.

Nott starts shaking him.  “Hey--wake up!” she hisses.  Her hands are trembling. The human doesn’t respond, and she has to check again that he really is breathing.  He can’t be dead; her plan will be in ashes and she’ll be left alone without any protection again. “Come on, wake up, dammit!”

After what feels like forever, the man’s eyelids twitch.  “ _ Was . . . ? _ ”

Nott sits back on her heels.  “Good. You’re still alive.”

“ _ Ich  _ . . . am I?”  His voice is rough.

“For now.”  She tugs at the sweat-soaked bandage around his arm, checking that the infection is still fading, and the man winces.

“Who . . . are you?” he asks faintly.

“I’m Nott.”

He reaches out with one shaky hand and finds her arm.  Nott sits very still as he follows the arm down the wrist to her hand, weakly feeling the rough skin, the sharp claws on the finger tips.  She watches the realization cross his face: Goblin.

But he’s either too sick or too stupid to care, and just lets his hand fall to the ground.  “I . . . I am Caleb,” he says, after a long pause. Each word seems to cost him, and he closes his eyes as he finishes speaking.

“Hey, hey, hey--don’t fall asleep again yet!”  Nott scampers over to the corner where she keeps her stash of leftover food.  She brings back a crust of the least stale bread they have and pinches Caleb’s arm.  “You have to eat to get strong.”

He opens his eyes again, and smiles a weak, pained grin.  “Think . . . little too late . . . for that.”

“<Shut up and stop squeaking,>” Nott tells him in Goblin.  “ _ Torak ac toldec-kho.   _ You’re going to live.”

His mouth opens in surprise, and Nott shoves a scrap of bread inside.  He takes a long time with it, chewing slowly. When he finally finishes, he’s breathing heavily, as if it was hard work.  He catches his breath and asks, “Why?”

“Because I want you to live,” she tells him.  And for some reason, this makes the man’s face collapse into tears.

“You don’t,” he chokes out, turning his head away from the piece of bread she offers.  “You don’t.” Despite Nott pinching his arm, the man’s eyes slip shut again, and, with the tears still running down his cheeks, he falls asleep, leaving Nott wondering what happened to this man--and whether she’s bitten off more than she can chew.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey my friends, just a heads up that there's more suicidal thoughts and some mild self-harm in this; do what you need to to take care of yourselves <3

The hardest moment in Caleb’s recovery is the one when he realizes he really is going to live after all.

He’s sitting up, leaning against the stone wall of the small cell because he doesn’t have the strength to hold himself upright on his own for long.  The goblin--Nott, he remembers dimly--is holding up a battered tray loaded with unidentifiable food. Caleb eats.

At first, he’s just following orders, letting his body do whatever its told so his mind can stay in the drowsy half-sleep where nothing is real and nothing hurts.  But at some point, his stomach is growling, and the sticky gray stuff on the plate looks  _ so good _ , and Caleb realizes he is hungrier than he’s ever been in his life.  He shoves food into his mouth, and he can’t chew it fast enough as his starved body demands more.  Nott squawks out something, but Caleb doesn’t hear, grabbing the chunks of stale bread with unsteady hands, licking the sauce from his fingers for every speck of precious nutrition.

Then, all of a sudden, he feels a lurch in his stomach, and he barely has time to lean over to one side before everything he ate is coming up again.  He hears himself groan as his heaving shifts cracked ribs, and black spots dance before his eyes. Again and again he retches, even when there’s nothing left to come up and he’s afraid his trembling arms are going to give out entirely.

When he’s finished, he leans his head against the wall and closes his eyes.  His breaths sob in his ravaged throat, and the room is spinning.

“All right, all right,” his goblin companion clucks.  “Let’s try some more water.”

Caleb gives his head the smallest shake, afraid to move.  “Don’t want . . . that again,” he mutters shakily.

“ _ Torak ac toldec-kho. _ ”  Nott wipes his face with a wet rag.  “You just ate too much too fast. Your body wants food, but not too much.  Try again more slowly, you’ll be okay.”

Caleb’s mind doesn’t want anything to do with food ever again, but Caleb’s body is already straining inwardly toward the water, his stomach ravenous underneath the nausea that still rolls over him.  He can’t help but take a sip of the water that Nott holds to his lips, and when he manages to keep it down, he takes a small bite of bread from her hand, chewing and swallowing carefully.

“It’s always like this when creatures are getting better from starving,” Nott is saying, chattering away as she rips chunks of stale crust into smaller-than-bite-size pieces.  “They want to eat too much before they’re ready. Your body knows it needs the food to get strong again, but your stomach got small while you were sick. It happened to us after a long winter; after the first spring raid, the adults would always chase the kids away from the table, otherwise they’d eat too much and just be puking it all back up and wasting good food.  There was one time this kid named Olec snuck into . . .”

Caleb doesn’t hear.  He’s caught up in this idea of his body trying so hard to eat, to get better, to  _ live _ .  Despite the crushing weight on his mind, his treacherous body is already working hard to recover.  And it’s winning. Already, despite the bout of vomitting, he’s stronger than he was a few days ago.  He’s awake. His head is clear. He feels hungry.

It’s all wrong.  He’s supposed to be dying.  He was all right with dying; it meant an end to the horrible knowledge of what he had done.  It meant, finally, to close his eyes and slip into a quiet darkness where Caleb the Monster was no more.  He deserved no less, anyway.

Now, he realizes with a start that he’s probably not going to die after all--not in the near future, anyway.  That he’s going to survive to live many long days with the person he’s found himself to be. Maybe years.

A cry of horror breaks from his lips, cutting off Nott’s story, and he tears at the bandages on his arms, digging his nails into the healing cuts.  The pain won’t take away the guilt, but it’ll dull it, distracting Caleb for a while. He doesn’t know how he’ll manage, otherwise.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Nott shrieks.  “Stop that, you’ll hurt yourself!”

Caleb pulls away from her grasp--when did he get strong enough to pull away from anybody?--and rips away the rough splint from his shattered right hand.  A wave of sickening pain shoots up his arm, and for a moment he is breathless with relief and nausea. 

Nott catches up with his frenzied movements, pulling his hands apart and clinging to his better arm to hold it down.  “You stop that right now!” she hisses. “Undoing my good work like that. You’re just going to make it worse.”

It’s unfair: For all its treacherous drive to get better, Caleb’s body is still too weak to fight for long.  He can only struggle against Nott’s grasp for a few seconds before, with a shudder, he lets his arms go limp.  Nott tsks and starts rewrapping the splint, muttering to herself, her finger-claws gently scritching against Caleb’s skin as she works on his hand.

“Why did you do that?” Nott asks, gentler now.

Caleb shakes his head.  “I shouldn’t be alive,” he mutters.  “It’s not right.” His voice cracks on the last word, and his next blink sends tears running down his cheeks.

Nott ties off the dirty bandage around the splint.  “There’s no should or shouldn’t. There’s just alive and dead.”

“You don’t--know--” Caleb chokes out.  “What I--I shouldn’t--” He can’t hold back the sobs now, and he hunches over his knees, shaking with pathetic, frustrated grief and rage.  He’s going to live, and he can’t help it. Even this weak body of his will offer no escape, just hard, slow weeks of pain and struggle to recover.

“ _ Torak ac toldec-kho, _ ” Nott tells him softly, a phrase that’s familiar from his fevered dreams.  “I’m here.”

“I don’t want this,” he wails, hearing in his voice the echo of a sick child crying for its mother.  His sobs go through his whole frame, violent and desperate and hopeless, and he hates himself for sounding so pathetic. Caleb tries to choke back the sobs, but the dark place inside his heart is open and he is falling into it, and it’s all he can do to keep from screaming.

Nott pulls him back to reality with fingers in his hair, gently petting like he’s a dog, and a voice above his head murmuring incomprehensibly in Goblin.  Caleb shuts his eyes and imagines, just for a moment, what it would be like to accept this comfort. The thought turns his stomach; he doesn’t deserve that.

“Come on,” Nott tells him.  “Let’s have some more water.”

Caleb’s mind is too tired to say no, and Caleb’s body is so thirsty.  He opens his mouth, and swallows.


	10. Chapter 10

As her project gets stronger and his body heals, Nott realizes she has to fix his mind as well as his body.  Caleb’s bruises turn from deep purple and blue to soft green; he can walk unsteadily across the room, and he’s even putting a little weight on his skinny frame.  But he still wakes screaming every time he sleeps, and the dark circles under his eyes are just getting deeper. Sometimes he lies staring at the wall for hours, and nothing Nott can do will rouse him.  If the guards come in while he’s in one of these states, 

Again, Nott is brought up short against her own incompetence and lack of knowledge.  She doesn’t know anything about fixing minds; she barely can tend to bodies. The goblins were never very good at fixing anything (if it wasn’t good enough to serve, it was thrown out and replaced, and that went for people as well as things) and what little she knows of medicine comes from trial and error and observing what the old woman did for hurt animals.  Nobody ever talked about making better a wounded mind. Nott doesn’t even know if such a thing can be done.

“Caleb,” she asks one day while they’re eating, “you’re very smart.  Have you ever studied medicine?”

“Studied?” Caleb mutters, and his eyes go far away.

Nott flicks him on the arm to bring him back; she doesn’t have time for this.  “Medicine,” she says, louder. “Making people better. What do you know about it?”

Caleb shakes his head.  “I don’t know much,” he says.  “Most of my magic is--for, for breaking things.”  His eyes widen. “Are you sick?”

Nott laughs.  “Me? I’m a Goblin, I don’t get sick.”

“Why are you asking about medicine, then?”

“Just curious.  I like to know things.  So what do you know about minds?”

Caleb’s fingers move in the air front of him as if he’s paging through an intangible book.  “I know a spell for . . . moving people’s minds. Helping them to agree with what you say. There are people who can do stronger spells, too.  They can take away free will, make others obey them completely--for a limited time, at least.” 

“People can  _ do  _ that?”  Nott’s jaw drops (never mind that her mouth is full of food; Caleb isn’t a goblin so he won’t steal it) at the thought of saying a word and watching the keepers march themselves back up the hallway to dunk their own heads in the icy water.  

“I think . . .  _ nein, _ I know--” Caleb continues, his voice going high and strained, “that there are spells for . . . changing memories, too.”

“What about for fixing minds?” Nott asks quickly.  “These are all spells for hurting. Doesn’t anybody use magic to  _ fix  _ minds?”

Caleb shrugs.  “I do not know.  Clerics know mending and healing; I am a wizard.”

“That’s stupid,” Nott grumbles.  “What good is it learning to break things if you can’t fix them?”

“Oh,” Caleb says.  He blinks, slowly. “I don’t know what good it is.”

Nott sighs, giving up on this line of inquiry, and shoves another piece of bread into his mouth.

Later that day, watching him toss and turn in dream-torn sleep, she decides that she’ll have to figure out this riddle on her own.  For all his magic, this boy is useless when it comes to anything that will fix him--not surprising, since he couldn’t even eat enough to keep himself alive before Nott came along.

The first question, she thinks, is what is the matter with her wizard’s mind?  Something bad happened to him, that much is clear. He has nightmares about it that make him scream.  What’s strange about it is that he’s not just frightened by the dreams; he’s also sad.

As if to prove her right, Caleb starts in his sleep and begins crying out.  He’s using the language she doesn’t know, but the sobs garbling his words are unmistakable in any language.  He sounds utterly wrecked, like a man whose heart has been ripped out of him. Nott tries to imagine what could make a person  _ so sad _ and comes up empty.

Well, she can work on the fear at least.  She crouches down next to Caleb and tugs on his arm until he wakes up, his eyes shooting open, his breath ragged with terror.  As he comes back to himself, he rolls over onto his stomach and starts to sob. Nott settles down next to him and tries rubbing his trembling shoulders.

“You’re safe,” she reminds him.  “You’re here in a locked room, and there are no dangers here.  It’s just you and Nott. And if anybody comes, you can send them off with your magic; you’re so strong.”  No harm in starting to train him for his purpose, she figures.

Under her hand, Caleb’s shaking has faded, and while he’s still crying, he’s slowing faster than he usually does.  Nott takes it as a good sign, and decides to take a stab at his sadness, even if she’s just guessing at the cause. “You’re very good at magic,” she tells him.  “The best. You can do a lot of things with it. Everyone in the clan thinks you’re very useful.”

Caleb turns up a tear-streaked face to her.  “The clan?” he asks.

Nott feels the blood rush to her face.  “I don’t know!” she squeaks. “I’m just talking! Don’t listen to me; I don’t even know what I’m saying!”

Caleb gives a quick burst of laughter--surprising himself as well as her, it seems--and Nott hides her smile at a job well done.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is not as intense or explicit as previous Caleb chapters, but the warnings about generally Bad Frame of Mind re. being alive still hold true. If reading about someone with depression is going to make things challenging for you, skip this chapter. (Skip this whole fic tbh.)

The days are so long.  Caleb is crushed under their weight, under the hours upon hours of nothing to do but to keep on breathing.  

His bruises have faded and the cuts are quickly knitting into faint white lines across his skin.  The fever that burned through his bones is gone; the black spots that swam through his vision have vanished now that he’s eating . . . not well, but regularly.  He feels better than he has a right to.

Incredibly, the pain in his heart is fading as well.  It’s still there (and he thinks it always will be; the thought that one day he might  _ not _ hurt at the thought of what he did is sickening), but now it’s a dull ache, more like his healing ribs than a new burn.  He prods at it, intentionally calling that night to mind and finds that the memory doesn’t have the power it once had to break him.  It makes him sad, and it makes him hate himself. But he thinks about it, and he doesn’t scream, and he doesn’t panic, and he doesn’t get trapped by images of flames dancing before his eyes.

So he lies on his back and stares up at the ceiling and breathes through the hours.  There is nothing else to do in this place, in this tiny room with nothing in it but a piss-pot and two damaged people--but even if he were out in the wide world, he thinks he might just let the time pass the same way.  What is there to do, now, after what he’s done? What should he hope for?

His cellmate doesn’t seem to share Caleb’s exhausted stupor: She has enough energy for three people her size, and she always seems to have something to do.  She flits around the cell with a nervous flutter that makes Caleb’s head hurt to watch, moving her stashes of food from one hiding place to another, scraping a shard of rock sharp against the stone wall, unwinding the strips of rags from her arms and re-wrapping them in ways that look completely identical to Caleb’s eyes.  All the activity is pointless--but it’s more interesting than staring at the ceiling, so Caleb finds himself spending long hours watching Nott.

This is when he starts noticing just how much time his companion spends being frightened.  Her ears start up and lean toward the door at any sound from the corridor, and when keepers’ footsteps approach their cell to drop off food or pick up empty trays, she scurries into the corner, cowering there trembling until they have gone again.  A clink of metal against metal--the guards’ keys swinging from their belts or rattling in a lock, or the battered tin cup that Caleb clumsily drops on the metal food tray--makes her jump half out of her skin. It’s strange to Caleb, but so are so many things about this small, talkative person who wants him to live.

Nott is forcing him to eat two-thirds of a rock-hard bread roll when keys jingle dully and the door swings open.  Caleb hadn’t even heard the keepers approach; Nott’s giggling throughout their mostly feigned argument had drowned out all sounds from the coridor.  Now, all merriment drains from Nott’s face as she freezes, one hand reflexively clutching at Caleb’s wrist.

“All right,” one of the keepers, a big half-orc fellow, drawls.  “Let’s not have any nonsense today. They’re cracking down on us that everyone gets their hydrotherapy treatment, so just come quietly and we won’t have to . . . convince you.”  He’s looking straight at Caleb as he says this, completely ignoring Nott, who has crept behind Caleb. A smile tugs at the corner of Caleb’s mouth; the keeper is worried about the wrong patient entirely.

Caleb shrugs.  “That is all right, we will not make any problem.”  He spreads his hands to show that he’s not holding anything dangerous--not that a wizard’s empty hands are any safer than a wizard’s hands wielding a knife--and pushes himself wearily to his feet.

He’s stopped by the terrified shriek from behind him.

Nott is huddled in the far corner of the room, her thin limbs trembling like leaves in the wind.  Her yellow eyes are wide with terror, and she strikes out wildly at the two keepers trying to catch her by the arms.

“No!  Don’t take me!” she is screaming.  “Caleb! Caleb, stop them!”

Nott has given Caleb orders before: “Caleb, eat this.”  “Caleb, lie down and go back to sleep.” “Caleb, sit up so I can check the cuts on your back.”  “Caleb, drink all this water.” Caleb has followed hundreds of orders from the girl.

This isn’t an order.  Nott is pleading.

Caleb’s hands are outstretched before he has time to think about what he’s doing.  He turns to the half-orc. “My  _ friend, _ ” he says, and a quick shimmer glints across the man’s eyes, at the same time that Caleb feels the blood he just smeared on his cheek flash warm for just a moment.  “Call your men off of her.”

“Hold up!” the keeper calls.  “Leave the little one alone.”

“No one in this room will be getting hydrotherapy today.”

“Right,” the keeper agrees.  “Course not.”

“Now, I think you should all leave.  Right away.”

The half-orc nods, and beckons the other keepers.  They exchange glances, but follow. (The way their eyes are fixed on Caleb makes him think their obedience is more from fear of the wizard’s powers than from any authority the big keeper holds.)  The door of the cell slams shut behind them, and the keys slide the bolts shut.

Caleb’s hands are trembling.  He stares at his fingers, his vision blurry.  He just did magic. After swearing he was through.  There is a ringing in his ears, and the taste of copper in his mouth.  He might need to sit down for a minute.

Then he  _ is _ sitting down, without remembering how he got there, and Nott’s excited chatter breaks through the static.

“--can’t believe it!  That was amazing; you were so  _ wonderful!” _  She clutches his hand in her two small ones.  “You are so strong and brave!”

Caleb can feel his teeth rattling in his head.  The world is still blurry and spinning a little bit, but that might be because he’s breathing so fast.  He tries to slow his breaths down, but they catch in his throat.

“You’re the best!” Nott is saying.  “You’re afraid of  _ nothing _ and  _ nobody.  _  You can do anything you put your mind to.”   Somewhere over the last few minutes, her eccstatic shrieking has shifted into something softer, almost crooning.  She’s still holding Caleb’s hand with one hand, but with the other she’s squeezing his shoulder. (Strangely enough, her hands are shaking too.)  Her finger-claws dig into his skin through his threadbare shirt, almost (but not quite) hard enough to hurt. Somehow, it helps Caleb feel a little more real.

He takes another shaky breath.  “That was . . . I didn’t expect . . .”  He rubs his face with his free hand.

“You were  _ wonderful _ ,” Nott tells him.  She moves to crouch in front of him and looks up into his face.  “You took care of me. Without you, I--” She frowns. “Caleb, you’re bleeding!  Are you hurt?”

“What?”  He looks down at his hand and sees a smear of blood.  “Oh,  _ ja _ , that is just . . . I need something red.  For the spell.”

Nott is already patting at his face with a corner of her smock.  The fabric is damp; did she lick it? “Where are you bleeding?”

“Just a bitten lip.  Nott, it’s all right.  I am fine.”

And he realizes: It’s almost--at least for the moment--true.


	12. Chapter 12

Caleb stirs in his sleep, and, on the other side of the room, Nott’s ears twitch in his direction.  She pauses for a minute, listening, but Caleb doesn’t make any more sound. Nott returns to sharpening her shard of rock, but after a minute she sets it down and crosses the room to get a closer look at Caleb--just to be sure.  She’s seen him weep silently in his sleep before.

Sleep is the wall that Nott still hasn’t figured out how to breach.  She’s--not  _ cured  _ him, certainly, but at least made  _ progress _ \--in every other area.  Caleb’s strong enough physically; he’s eating well and his cuts have healed without further infection.  And during the daytime, his mind seems to be healing as well. Where before he spent all his time lying listless on the ground, staring at nothing, needing to be coaxed to eat or drink, now he is up and moving about more, and he eats without prompting.  He even talks to her sometimes--safe subjects like what food they’re missing most or what they imagine the weather is like outside. He rarely breaks down in tears. He seems, if not happier, at least quieter in his mind.

But at night, when he’s asleep, everything’s different.  Caleb is wracked by nightmares every time he closes his eyes, and when he finally screams himself awake he is shaking, sobbing incoherently.  During the day, Nott sees her hard work paying off, but at night, Caleb doesn’t seem to even know she’s there.

Last night was an especially bad one.  Caleb was restless when they went to bed, keeping Nott awake with his tossing and turning long after the keepers put the lights out.  Some time after they finally did drift off to sleep, Nott was awakened by hoarse cries--and they continued even after she had shaken Caleb awake.  In the dimness she could see his eyes staring at something that wasn’t really there, and he screamed and screamed and didn’t seem to hear her telling him it wasn’t real.

It happened again a few hours later.  And again. And again. After the fourth time, Caleb sat and cried for a long time, his broken sobs shaking his shoulders.

“ _ Torak ac toldec-kho,” _ Nott told him again and again, rubbing his back.  “ _ Torak ac toldec-kho, _ you’re safe.  Nobody can hurt you.”  Under her hand, Caleb shuddered and choked and didn’t stop weeping.  They kept on like this until Nott’s own eyes stung with tears of frustration at her uselessness, her inability to do anything to fix Caleb.

After Caleb finally stopped sobbing, nodding with exhaustion, he pushed himself to his feet.  Running one hand along the wall, he walked to the other side of the cell, paused, turned, and walked back.  He repeated it: Eight steps across, eight steps back.

“Caleb, what are you doing?” Nott asked.

“I do not think I want to sleep again tonight,” Caleb told her hoarsely.

“But you  _ have  _ to sleep.”

“Tonight, I am finished,” Caleb said decisively.  “Go back to bed, Nott.”

She hesitated, but after a while she laid back down.  And to be frank, she was exhausted; the steady rhythm of Caleb’s pacing pushed her quickly down into sleep.

The next morning, Caleb looked a wreck.  He was pale, shaky, with deep circles under his eyes.  He looked like he’d gone a week without sleep instead of just half a night.  He picked at the stale bread they were given mid-morning, and answered all Nott’s attempts at conversation with one-word answers.

So Nott had been glad when, sometime in the afternoon, Caleb’s head had begun to nod.  She’d kept as quiet as she could and, within a few minutes, Caleb had leaned to one side, and then sagged down onto the floor.  For an hour or so, his sleep had been quiet, and Nott had sat herself down to carefully hone the edge of her shiv against the wall, not wanting to do anything louder for fear of interrupting this rare period of rest.

When Caleb had shifted and muttered some unintelligible scraps of words, Nott had been afraid the nightmares were coming back.  But now, tiptoeing over to check on him, she sees him sleeping quietly again. His face looks so young when he’s asleep and the tension lines relax a little; underneath all the dirt and the ragged beard, he has a boy’s face.  As Nott watches, Caleb stirs again, sighing softly before settling into a more comfortable position.

Nott is still crouched there beside him, waiting for him to be sleeping soundly before she moves, when she hears the footsteps in the hall.

Her first instinct is to wake Caleb, but she quickly gets ahold of herself.  There are always keepers walking around this place. It’s foolish to assume they’re coming here, and wasteful to spoil Caleb’s sleep for nothing.

The footsteps grow nearer.  They pass the place in the corridor where, if they were going to turn, they would have.  They stop in front of the cell door.

Nott is trembling now, her hands clammy with sweat.  She whirls around, reaching out for Caleb, to shake him awake so he can do his soft voice and order the guards away, or that flashing light thing he did before that knocked them to the floor.

She stops, hands inches from Caleb’s shoulder.  Her heart is pounding so loud she can hear it in her ears, almost drowning out the rattle of the keys in the lock.

He needs his sleep.

He was so frightened last night, and so tired when the light finally came back to the cell.  She could  _ see _ the exhaustion weighing heavy on him, clouding his eyes, making his powerful hands clumsy and stupid.

She hisses in anger, flecks of spit dancing flying from her lips.  They’re coming for her. There will be hands gripping her arms so hard they bruise, derisive laughter as she screams and struggles and can’t do  _ anything _ against them, and the water, cold as death, filling her ears and nose and mouth.  It is hell, being so frightened and so powerless, and it is  _ going _ to happen again, unless she wakes up her wizard.

She doesn’t touch Caleb.

Her finger-claws bite into the palms of her clenched fists.  This is  _ why _ she’s been taking such good care of him all these weeks, damn it, so that he can keep them away from her!  What is the point of all the trouble she’s gone to, feeding him and licking his wounds and talking to him and waking him up when he has bad dreams, if she isn’t going to at least get a little bit of safety out of it?

She closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at the dark hollows under Caleb’s eyes.  Her hands tremble as she reaches out again.

And stops again.

When the door opens, the keepers flinch back at the sight of the goblin girl standing right in front of the door.

“Let’s go,” she says quietly, arms held out for them.  “He’s sleeping.”


	13. Chapter 13

The room is empty when Caleb wakes.  He sits bolt upright, looking around (as if it were possible in this bare room to hide, even for a small person like Nott), his heart rate increasing.  Everything else is just as it was when he went to sleep: The pot in the corner, the battered metal tray waiting by the door to be collected, Nott’s shiv lying by the far wall.  But Nott is gone.

Caleb tells himself to not to worry unnecessarily, but he finds himself pacing the room.  Without Nott’s chatter, the silence of the room presses down on him, crushes his chest. He starts muttering under his breath to fend it off.

“You know it was the keepers, they must have come and taken her.  They do that often here, to bring people for treatments. You remember that, they used to take you for treatments sometimes--not the . . . the other ones, when you were screaming so much, but the water.  She will be all right. They will bring her back soon.”

But he remembers that day when the keepers had come for them, the day he had used magic intentionally for the first time in years.  Nott had been  _ so frightened _ .  Caleb’s skin still remembers the feeling of Nott’s trembling hands, gripping his shoulder; even while trying to calm him down, she’d been shaking like a tree in a storm.  Caleb knows what it feels like to tremble that way.

And now the thing she feared so deeply--going with the keepers, the ice bath, getting roughed up, whatever it was that cut to Nott’s soul--had happened while Caleb slept soundly.

“She’s fine,” Caleb tells himself again.  “She is afraid, but she is strong, and she will be all right.  What can I do?”

He knows what he can do; he doesn’t  _ want _ to do it.

In another place, banging a tin pan repeatedly against a stone wall would bring people running right away to see what the commotion was all about.  Here, it’s several deafening minutes before a keeper pokes his head around the corner.

“Hey, knock off that racket, or you lose the pan,” he shouts.

Caleb bites his lip hard, and brushes a thumb through the blood.  “Come here,  _ friend _ ,” he calls down the hall, and as the blood flares warm against his skin the man goes still for a minute, and then, shaking himself, trots down the hall toward Caleb’s door.

“I think you should open this door,” Caleb tells him.  “And then you should take me to where they took the little one.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” the keeper agrees.  In another minute, Caleb is out of the cell and following the man down the hallway toward the hydrotherapy chamber.

He’s been this way before, many times, but only flashes of it are familiar.  He remembers barking his shins every day on these uneven stone steps. There’s a cell where a moaning voice floats between the bars on the door; that voice rolled through his nightmares for years, back when his dreams were all fire and smoke and nothing of substance.  That corner of the ceiling, where the plaster is crumbling and black with mildew is burned into his memory from the time when his body was there but his mind was . . . somewhere else; Caleb wonders if there’s a reason or if it was just a random thing his vacant eyes decided to fixate on.

From up ahead, he hears something that is familiar to his ears here and now: Nott’s voice, shrieking desperately.  Caleb hurries past the keeper, who blinks at him in mild confusion as Caleb lets the spell drop. His bare feet slap against the floor as he runs down the hall, following the sound of Nott’s screams.

The door slams against the wall as Caleb shoves it open.  Nobody even notices, with all the chaos that’s already in progress in the room.  Nott is spread-eagled between two keepers, kicking and shrieking while they try to hang on to her arms and legs.  One keeper is on his bottom on the floor, surrounded by splashed water. Another is winding up to punch Nott in the stomach.

Time seems to freeze as Caleb mentally runs through his spellbook.  He can’t use Friends on them all; the spell will only capture one at a time, and one of them changing his mind in the middle of the “treatment” would be too suspicious.  Dancing Lights might blind them . . . but no, it’s not strong enough, and it would hamper him and Nott as much as the keepers. Chromatic Orb requires a diamond and Caleb has nothing but a pair of filthy pajamas.  He could . . . no, he couldn’t.

There’s only one option, and Caleb swore never to do it again.

But Nott’s eyes are wide with terror and Caleb remembers her hand trembling on his shoulders, and it is not really a choice.

Caleb stretches out his hand and the skin blackens and starts to flake away (that part’s new, he notes with sick detatchment); the heat builds under his skin and then with a roar that seems to eat up all the air in the room, a blast of fire shoots out of his hand, hitting the keeper holding Nott’s feet square in the chest.

The man explodes in flame.  

Caleb can feel the heat of the man’s fire against his skin.  His mouth is full of the the dark, rusty smell of burning flesh.  The man’s skin blisters and turns black and there is slick, shiny flesh underneath already burning, and the flames leap higher, blocking out the rest of the room.  The man’s hair is on fire. 

The keeper’s screams fill Caleb’s head, pulling him down into the nightmare-world that is always there inside Caleb, where his parents are forever burning and screaming and choking and dying.


	14. Chapter 14

At first, Nott is so overwhelmed by basic animal panic that she doesn’t realize that she’s been rescued, only that the hands are off her ankles and she can move.  She bucks and wrenches her hands out of the other keeper’s grasp, landing in a crouch on the wet stone floor. There’s an open path to the wall; she takes it. Pressing her back to the corner, she shakes the sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes and bares her teeth, ready to snap at any fingers that come her way.

But the keepers aren’t paying her any attention.  They seem to be distracted by--

Oh.

Now that the edge of her panic is blunted, Nott notices the smell of burning hair, the sizzle of blazing fat meeting water.  The burning keeper has fallen to the floor, his blackened limbs twitching convulsively; he is far past screaming, but a few agonized croaks come from his charred lips.  The other keepers have already fled. 

And Caleb  _ (he came after her, he fought them off for her, he  _ saved  _ her) _ is on his knees in the pool of spilled water, his hands shaking.

Nott creeps across the room, past the pile of smoking flesh that isn’t really a person anymore, splashing through the water to Caleb.  He stares right through her, tears running down his cheeks. Nott knows that broken look on his face; it’s the one he wears just after awakening from a nightmare, when he’s still seeing whatever monsters lurk in his dreams and doesn’t know where he is.  Only this time, he isn’t waking up.

“Caleb,” Nott rasps, her throat wrecked by screaming and smoke.  “Caleb, come back!”

Caleb’s shoulders shudder as a sob runs through him.  Not sure what else to do, Nott grasps him by the arms and shakes as hard as she can.  It doesn’t make sense that shaking someone who’s already trembling should do any good--but, for  _ once _ in her gods-damned life, Nott is lucky.

Caleb sits back on his heels.  His face is still gray and he’s still shivering, but he’s here, at least mostly.  Nott climbs up on his knee to get her feet out of the horrible cold water, and scrubs the tears from his face with the corner of her tunic.

“Do you know where you are?” she asks him, remembing how he would sometimes latch onto her voice after nightmares.  “You’re in the Veerhalfen Assylum, down in the ice-bath room. That’s why it’s so wet and awful in here.”

Caleb makes a vague sound of acknowledgement.  He’s still shaking, and looking down, Nott sees that his right hand is blackened and awful-looking.  She squeaks and snatches it up to try to tend to it, but it turns out it isn’t burned at all, only covered with a thin layer of a black substance that flakes away as soon as she touches it.  So she keeps up her monologue as she brushes off Caleb’s hands--first the right one, then the left one, for good measure.

“You don’t have to worry about the keepers; they’re all gone away, and I don’t think they’ll be coming back any time soon.  You scared them real good. And I . . . I’m so glad you did. I know it’s silly of me, but that water . . . it just puts the fear in me, somehow.  If you hadn’t come, I would’ve--it would--”

And it’s then that the adrenalin that’s been singing in Nott’s veins suddenly leaves her, like a trapdoor dropping out beneath her feet.  She starts to cry, big choking sobs of relief and terror. She’s crying because she didn’t go into the water, and because she almost did, and because Caleb came for her even when he didn’t have to, and because she’s a grown lady bawling her eyes out over a bath and she doesn’t know why.

“ _ Torak ac toldec-kho, _ ” a weak, scratchy voice above her head says.

Nott looks up at Caleb, disbelieving.  “What did you tell me?”

Caleb still looks fragile around the eyes, but he’s seeing her, and not whatever is in his nightmares.  “You’ve said it to me before, when I was upset. Am I not using it right?”

Nott grins through her tears.  “No, that’s just right.”

“Well then.   _ Torak ac toldec-kho, _ Nott.”  Caleb touches her shoulders like he wants to hug her, or rub her back, but doesn’t know how.  “It’s over now.”

“You saved me.  You--” she motions at the smoking body.  “You did that for me.”

“Well.”  A blush runs up Caleb’s face.  “You have helped me many times, you know.”

“Not like--nothing big, nothing like this.”

Caleb shrugs lopsidedly.  “This, this is one little spell.  I could do this--” he falters for a moment, but picks back up, “--this is not hard.  I think that you did something much more difficult. It was something that I could not do.”

Nott doesn’t know what to say to that, so she indulges in one last shiver of fear, and then slides off Caleb’s lap and starts to pull herself together.  “The keepers are going to be pretty mad, I guess,” she says, wiping the tears and snot from her face.

Caleb glances toward the door, as if just now remembering that they are in a madhouse where they’re supposed to be kept under lock and key (gods bless the man, maybe he’s right--maybe he  _ is _ entirely incapable of taking care of himself).  “No, I suppose you are right.”

“They probably aren’t going to put us back in the same cell after this,” Nott says.  She thinks she might be asking a question.

“I don’t think I want to go back into  _ any  _ cell,” Caleb says.  “Not anymore.” He pushes himself to his feet.  “Do you want to get out of this place?”

Nott takes his hand.


End file.
